Overview

Winner of the 2007 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, Selected by John YauCatherine Pierce’s debut, Famous Last Words, is a love letter to life, poetry, and all things American. Beginning with a series of literal love poems (to the word “lonesome”, to blank space, to doo-wop, to fear, etc.), Pierce whisks the reader on a cross-country road trip (both literally and figuratively) that takes a tangential spree into a series of genre films and ends with gallows humor in the re-imagining of the events surrounding the famous last words of icons like Billy the Kid, Marie Antoinette, Isadora Duncan, and Pancho Villa. From start to finish, Pierce’s book is a delight to the senses, a playful, nostalgic dance that ends with the reader wanting more.

Author Biography

CATHERINE PIERCE Pierce grew up in Delaware and now lives in Starkville, Mississippi, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Mississippi State University. She is the author of a chapbook, Animals of Habit (2004).